The London bombings: one year on

A year of thinking lazily

On 14 July 2005 the Times published a photograph of a thoughtful young man at work in a Yorkshire classroom. Mohammad Sidique Khan was pictured, purse-lipped and neatly bearded, in the school where he was employed as a teaching mentor. Khan’s CV was one of which any parent might be proud. The son of a foundry worker who had emigrated from Pakistan, Khan was born in Leeds, where he succeeded at school and went on to univer-sity. Happily married, and a regular worshipper at his local mosque, Khan’s work seemed designed to allow others to enjoy the British dream. His professional life was dedicated to helping the children of recent immigrants make the most of the opportunities open to them in the United Kingdom.

That life ended, however, at 8.50 a.m. on 7 July 2005, when Mohammad Sidique Khan detonated an explosive device on the Circle Line train heading west out of Edgware Road station. Khan and three others — Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Husain and Jermaine Lindsay — blew themselves up that morning in the first successful suicide bombing attack in the British Isles; 52 people were killed and more than 700 injured.

In the year since then our public conversation has, unsurprisingly, been dominated by questions of security and identity. But what has been most striking about the conversation is how quickly it has become diverted into an interrogation of those who seek, however imperfectly, to defend us rather than an examination of what moves those who threaten us. The question of whether or not the Metropolitan Police’s principal anti-terrorist officer should or should not receive a CBE has occupied more airtime than the question of what ideology motivates mass murderers.

The Metropolitan Police are under scrutiny as never before, following the tragic death of Jean Charles de Menezes and the botched raid in Forest Gate. But while those protesting against the Forest Gate raid chose to show solidarity with the grieving de Menezes family by sporting Brazilian football shirts bearing the dead man’s name, how many of the names of the 52 who died on 7 July 2005 have been given anything like the same prominence? The least we owe those who died that day is a serious commitment to understand what drove their killers, and a determination to tackle the ideology which guided deliberately murderous minds.

Nowhere has moral clarity been more lacking in British state policy over the last ten to 15 years than in our approach to the Islamist threat. Three particular errors have characterised our mistaken approach.

The first error has been the willingness to extend a ‘covenant of security’ to known Islamist activists within the UK.

The second error has been the determined minimisation of the Islamist terror threat. Instead of recognising the scale of the challenge mounted by political Islam, the British state persisted for years in believing that those who posed a direct danger to the country were a tiny renegade minority with no important connection to a broader ideological network.

The third error has been the failure to scrutinise, monitor or check the actions, funding and operation of those committed to spreading the Islamist gospel within Britain.

All three errors are interconnected. They spring from a basic failure of political intelligence, the inability properly to conceptualise the threat we face.

The men who wrought such devastation last July were not foreign fighters prosecuting a struggle of national liberation against a colonial overlord. They had been born, nurtured and supported by Britain and its institutions. They were not desperately poor and voiceless outsiders, Franz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ driven to violence because no other option lay open to them to secure justice. They had enjoyed the freedoms and opportunities of the West, holding down respected jobs and living lives of relative comfort. And they were not psychopaths, or empty nihilists who found in violence an end in itself. As they themselves made clear, they saw their violence serving a cause and a purpose higher than themselves. As Khan himself proclaimed, in a videotape broadcast after his death, ‘We are at war and I am a soldier.’

Mohammad Sidique Khan’s broadcast explicitly linked his actions with the campaign prosecuted by al-Qa’eda’s leaders, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. His enlistment as a soldier was driven, he explained, by his religion: ‘Islam — obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger Muhammad.’ The terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombing were, according to Bosnian police, trained in al-Qa’eda camps in that country. They were also, according to British intelligence sources, working in co-operation with a Syrian al-Qa’eda fighter who, after leading operations in Europe, is now believed to be in Iraq.

Even where no explicit link between terrorist cells and known al-Qa’eda operatives is established, the operational style, political rhetoric and ideological justification deployed by different Islamist fighters underline their shared approach. From the Hamas killers in Gaza to Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Islamist fighters across Southeast Asia, from Indonesia to the Philippines, there is a ruthlessness in the selection of civilian targets, reinforced by a willingness to embrace suicide bombing, a belief that Western influence needs to be cleansed from Muslim lands, and a desire to see a narrow and highly politicised form of Islam imposed across the Muslim world.

The global and interconnected nature of the Islamist terror campaign can only be understood by grappling with the totalitarian ideology which drives jihadist warriors.

Contemporary Islamism draws inspiration from the puritan strain in Islamic thinking, but it is much more than just a form of religious revivalism. It is a specifically political movement which sees the answer to every social, cultural and moral problem in the implementation of a political programme derived from strict Islamic principles and imposed at the point of a sword. Islamism is not a campaign to restore piety through teaching, preaching and encouragement to private devotion. It is a revolutionary attempt to remake society, by argument certainly, but also inevitably by force, in order to secure total submission to a uniquely austere and militaristic divinity.

The thinkers responsible for shaping Islamism as we now know it are the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna; the Brotherhood’s principal theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, and the Pakistani ideologue Abul Al’a Mawdudi. Together they exercise a bewitching guiding influence over the ranks of Islamist terrorists conducting the jihad we face today. When we trace the influences on the minds of those who have been drawn into extremist activity, the teachings of these men and their followers recur again and again.

These thinkers and their disciples believe in the re-ordering of society to secure total submission to a narrow, puritan and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. They are conducting a civil war within the Islamic world designed to overthrow existing regimes, which they consider to be unforgivably apostate, and replace them with a single and unified Muslim state, the restored Caliphate. Islamists believe that the sanctity and culture of Muslim lands are menaced and defiled by Western influences, from capitalism to feminism, which have to be eradicated.

That cleansing process must be accomplished by suicidal violence because, in the words of Islamism’s most influential thinker, Sayyid Qutb, ‘the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood’.

The bloodshed should not stop at Islam’s current borders. Not just because those nations which are unIslamic constitute Dar-al Harb, the House of War, which constantly threatens the security of the Muslim world. But also because Islamists are driven by a divine mission to ensure the whole earth, in due course, learns to submit to Islamist rule.

But there is still, after the shattering events of 9/11 and 7/7, Madrid and Bali, a widespread reluctance to acknowledge the real scale and nature of the challenge we face.

There is a reason why so many of the influential voices shaping our society’s response to Islamist terror are urging us down the wrong path. There is a culture of relativism, a failure to display moral clarity, a corruption of thought on both Left and Right as well as a strain of Western self-hatred which combine to weaken, compromise and confuse our national response to a direct totalitarian challenge.

Changing our laws, vital as it is, can only be part of our response. We need to rediscover and reproclaim faith in our common values. We need an ideological effort to move away from moral relativism, as well as a commitment to build a truly inclusive model of British citizenship in which divisive separatist identities are challenged, and rejected.

In following this path sensitivities will be offended, special interests upset and powerful voices raised in opposition. But unless we show that we are serious about defeating the forces which have encouraged Islamist terrorism, Islamist terrorists will have many opportunities in the future to demonstrate just how serious they are about using force to defeat us.

This is an edited extract from Celsius 7/7 published this week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The author is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath and a Times columnist.